Smartphones are turning you dumb — and the rest of us mean

A pedestrian walks between cars blocking a crosswalk at 2nd and Bryant streets in San Francisco.

A pedestrian walks between cars blocking a crosswalk at 2nd and...

The traffic had slowed to a crawl during rush hour on Mission Street, and I was standing on the corner with a herd of other pedestrians waiting for the light to change. My fellow pedestrians included an elderly man, a twitching guy who looked as if he’d been sleeping rough, a tired-looking mother with one stroller wheel that was stuck — the usual motley crew.

While the cars in front of us nosed bumpers and honked, we waited our turn. Then, when the light changed, we watched one driver decide that he was going to gun the intersection, right-of-way be damned.

The driver was blocking the intersection and the pedestrian crossing, and I felt everyone around me shake their heads in disgust as we waded into traffic. As we got closer, we all looked at him, just to let him know how disgusted we were.

You will be shocked — shocked! — to learn that the driver was in a BMW and was yammering into an earpiece. He wasn’t paying any attention to the pedestrians trying to squeeze out of the street.

So the elderly man smacked the hood of the car. He didn’t hit it very hard, but the thump was enough to rattle the driver out of his self-involved bubble long enough to look up in shock.

When he looked up, he saw the elderly man striding forward with no shame — and me, giving my fellow pedestrian a slow clap.

I don’t know whether the driver looked around and saw the mother — who’d had to shove her baby through cross traffic — nod emphatically at the swat, but we did.

When we all made it to the other side of the street, we exchanged brief glances of grim relief and went our separate ways. We survived that particular encounter, but here’s the thing — I don’t think any of us felt proud about wishing we could smack the driver, not just his car.

He’d instilled a spirit of rage in all of us, and for what? Just so he could jam up the next intersection, forcing other people toward certain danger?

I’ve written a lot about why our smartphone-enabled state of zombie mobility presents safety concerns. But as things get worse and worse, I find myself less worried about the physical safety of others — go ahead and step right into traffic if that Instagram post is that important to you — and more worried about the emotional safety of the rest of us.

As more and more people stop participating in the physical environment around them, it becomes contingent on the rest of us to watch out for them and to protect them.

In other words, it becomes our job to pay attention — when they’ve decided we’re not worth the same favor.

What happens when we decide to stop bothering?

It sounds awful. It is awful.

It’s also a real possibility, and this is the first place it’s going to happen.

I’ve already started to notice it in myself, and I don’t like it. (Want to walk down the street with your nose in a phone? I’m not going to apologize when I bump into you!)

I want to care, in a normal human way, about someone who’s about to step right into traffic because she’s holding a phone up to her face. I even want to have empathy for that BMW driver who’s in a hurry to close that important deal.

But the more this kind of behavior becomes the norm, the harder it is for me to maintain that sense of general consideration. And if it’s happening to me, it’s probably happening to other people, too.

A social science researcher told me recently that we’re on a frontier of social behavior. The ubiquity of smartphones and the isolation they bring is still brand new, she said, and we haven’t developed either social norms around their use or when they should be restricted.

She insists that we’ll develop these things as time goes on and we have a better understanding of their dangers.

I sure hope so. In the meantime, I told her to add this to the list of dangers: the danger that these new behaviors affect not just individual cognition, but also collective patience; not just individual safety, but also collective concern.

We’re all still in this together, even if we keep trying to use our phones as an escape.